2004 is upon us, and we were hardly used to being into 2003. That is how Jane and I feel about the way time is flying by. So here are a few words to let you know that we are still on the list of the living. We are a bit late, but we have never been known to be first on the line.

After a summer in Northland NZ cruising and working on boat maintenance, including all of an oh-too-rainy February on the ways painting topsides and having keels and rudders sand blasted and coated (and watching the Americas Cup fiasco) we sailed north at the end of June. We spent the next four months in the Vava'u Island group of Tonga.

We are still playing the same game, living aboard and cruising enjoyable locations, doing it in our low-key, low-cost habitual way. Funnily, in contrast with the day when we started and were the young ones in the fleet, we are now seniors in amongst the great number of younger folk who are cruising today. MAGIC DRAGON is also one of the seniors in the fleet. She'll have her fortieth birthday this coming August, but she is not showing her age like the rest of us. Actually she fits in better with the amazing modern flotilla of today's cruising yachts than do her more conventional contemporaries.

Thanks to her roller furling and reefing sails we can still sail her easily. We wonder how we managed with hanked sails for the first twenty years. Now I can hardly lift the sail bags. Some enormous yachts are cruised by just one couple thanks to sail handling made easy.

How we would have liked GPS and plotter in the early days. We have a copy of C-Map on the laptop. It is amazing. Who could have imagined colour charts of the entire world on two CDs, and a boat icon showing our position within feet at all times on a chart on screen? It would have saved us untold hours of worry approaching England after two weeks of overcast weather and on approaches to BC, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Saipan and elsewhere with similar lack of sextant sights for fixes.

However, our equipment, which amazes us, pales by comparison to what most yachts cruise with nowadays. Besides radar (we'd still rather cruise where radar is not needed than invest in one of them), synchronized radar/plotter/wind sensor/autopilot is the thing now. But we have our windvane that does our steering well, and it needs no electricity or electronic servicemen. We get weather maps via radio fax, but now that is antiquated technology. Yachts get on the Internet for onboard email and weather information. Some have distant weathermen giving them updates and advice several times a day.

Cruising has changed indeed, but it is still fun to meet the people doing it and most are an interesting bunch. Besides doctors, pilots and boat builders, electronics nerds have joined the ranks of the many. When I found myself suffering high fever and gut pains last September, there happened to be four doctors in the anchorage. One from Alaska diagnosed acute diverticulitis (probably caused from eating too much raw coconut). He and a lovely MD from Quadra Island, BC helped me get over the problem. Intravenous rehydration and antibiotics, along with Jane's TLC, did the trick.

Here in New Zealand the coastline is changing fast. The little people that used to live off the land on the beach have sold to big money. Now it is large rarely-occupied houses, fancy motor yachts, helicopter access--mostly Americans, Germans and Brits. The problem is that it has put land prices up out of reach of the average Kiwi, and that is too bad. But at least the buildings are not desecrating the view. Landscapers and other slaves are the most visible bods we see.

All in all, from MAGIC DRAGON we see the world through rose-coloured glasses, and we make sure to listen or read news of the real world as seldom as possible to keep the illusion alive. If little aches and memory holes did not remind us otherwise, we could still think that time is not overtaking us. "What next?" is the question, but who has an answer to what will happen in their mid or late seventies? In French they say: "Qui vivra verra".

Happy 2004.